What a difference a few days makes, eh?

On Monday morning, if you were on twitter or watching the teevee you'd have assumed the stock market was about to get cut in half and the pitchforks were going to be lining up outside the Federal Reserve building in Washington, D.C.

Then, the market did what the market does and now here we are with the S&P 500 looking like it wants to make another run at all-time highs.

Forget about market volatility --- how about trader's emotional volatility?!

With this in mind, there is still some nice options premium being priced into individual names that offer us some unique tactical opportunities for some quick gains.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley

Major world currencies continue to struggle against the US dollar.

Both the euro and British pound have been coiling near 52-week lows against the dollar. We’re also seeing weakness spread among commodity-centric currencies, as the Canadian dollar hit new 52-week lows this week, and the Australian dollar accomplished the same earlier in the month. As for the safe-haven Japanese yen, USD/JPY hit its highest level since 2017 at the end of November. 

The bottom line is that we continue to see broad strength from the greenback.

Meanwhile, the US Dollar Index $DXY continues to consolidate within a tight continuation pattern.

As we wait for a resolution either higher or lower, we can look to these individual forex pairs for an indication of which direction we’re likely headed.

Let’s revisit the potential failed breakdown from the Australian dollar earlier in the month and the recent action in the...

It's not a secret around here that market breadth started to deteriorate in February.

If you recall, that's when everyone had a SPAC.

The IPO index peaked, ARK Funds, Biotech, the new highs list, etc all stopped going up.

That was over 10 months ago.

But more recently, market breadth is getting all the attention. Everyone is a breadth expert now, you notice?

I'm even getting software developers asking me about my breadth analysis wishlist so they can build it for me. Which I love and I certainly appreciate, but just goes to show you another sign of the times.

The way I see it, if you're trying to get defensive NOW because of breadth deterioration, I think you might be looking at it completely wrong.

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

This is one of our favorite bottom-up scans: Follow the Flow. In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish… but NOT both.

We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients. Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.

What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind… and they’re doing so for one...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Welcome to our latest Minor Leaguers report.

We’ve already had some great trades come out of this small-cap-focused column since we launched it late last year and started rotating it with our flagship bottom-up scan, Under the Hood.

We recently decided to expand our universe to include some mid-caps…

For about a year now, we’ve focused only on Russell 2000 stocks with a market cap between $1 and $2B. That was fun, but it’s time we branch out a bit and allow some new stocks to find their way onto our list.

The way we’re doing this is simple…

To make the cut for our new Minor Leaguers list, a company must have a market cap between $1 and $4B. And it doesn’t have to be a Russell component–it can be any US-listed equity. With participation expanding around the globe, we want all those ADRs in our...

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

We study a wide variety of sentiment data as we incorporate many different indicators into our day-to-day analysis.

In its simplest form, sentiment tells us how certain market participants or investors feel about the market.

Are investors feeling bullish and increasing their exposure to risk?

Or, are investors feeling fearful and positioning defensively?

More often than not, these are contrarian indicators that work best when at extremes.

One of our favorite sets of sentiment data comes from a weekly report published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It is called the Commitment Of Traders, or COT report, and it simply outlines how various participants are positioned in futures markets.

We get lots of questions regarding how we analyze the COT report, so let’s talk about two of the main ways we find value in this information.

It's Saturday Morning Chartoons time. 

This is the weekly post that aggregates all the charts we put together throughout the week and organizes them all into one, easy to flip through deck.

You can find the whole list of trades here.

Below you'll find the full PDF of this week's charts:

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

Outside of the large-cap averages in the US, most stocks have been stuck in sideways trends for much of 2021. We’ve seen breakouts fail in both directions over the past two months, as sloppy price action continues to govern the broader market.

As we discussed in our last intermarket post, this range-bound action has not just been the case for stocks on an absolute basis. We’re seeing the same thing from commodities, cryptocurrencies, and even our risk-appetite ratios. Risk assets have simply been a mess.

Let's take a look at one of our favorite risk-appetite ratios, as there's been an important development in the discretionary versus staples relationship. 

Here is large-cap consumer discretionary $XLY versus consumer staples $XLP: 

Notice how this ratio was rallying aggressively coming into 2021. Now think back to what stocks and other risk assets were doing during this time. Everything was working, right?

Consumer discretionary...

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley

Not unlike the major US equity indexes, the commodity space is still range-bound as we head into year-end.

When we compare the trailing 12-month returns of individual groups, we get a sense of how bifurcated the commodity market has been. Another thing that stands out is just how weak precious metals have been relative to their peers.

While the rest of the asset class has posted solid gains on the year, gold and silver continue to trend lower. If this is truly a commodities supercycle, we’d expect to see some participation from this group. And, considering they’ve been in a downtrend for almost 18-months now as the rest of the space has been working, we’d expect it to happen soon. 

Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on with these shiny rocks.

First, here’s a chart with the trailing 12-month returns of our four major commodity indexes - energy, precious metals, base metals, and ags:

...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Our Hall of Famers list is composed of the 100 largest US-based stocks.

These stocks range from the mega-cap growth behemoths like Apple and Microsoft – with market caps in excess of $2T – to some of the new-age large-cap disruptors such as Moderna, Square, and Snap.

It has all the big names and more.

It doesn’t include ADRs or any stock not domiciled in the US. But don’t worry; we developed a separate universe for that. Check it out here.

The Hall of Famers is simple.

We take our list of 100 names and then apply our technical filters so the strongest stocks with the most momentum rise to the top.

Let’s dive right in and check out what these big boys are up to.

Here’s this week’s list:

And here’s how we arrived at it:

• Filter out any stocks that are below their May 10th high, which is when new 52-week highs...

We have a new Options trade up this week.

We're buying an $MMC April 170/200 Bull Call Spread for around a $7.50 debit all in. This means we’re long the 170 calls and short an equal amount of 200 calls..

Check out our short video with the thought process behind these trades: